Letti Park
Page 11
My mother went to Mrs Rubinstein three times a week in the early evening after her work at the municipal office; once I picked her up from there. Mrs Rubinstein was sitting in an armchair in her living room in front of the television set. Her hair was carefully combed, tinted violet. She wore an ironed blouse and had a wool blanket over her knees on which her hands slid back and forth, feeling for something invisible. She was absorbed in a shopping programme, and I was able to look at her bedroom undisturbed: the mirror in whose oval my mother and Margo had looked at themselves forty years ago; I could tug on the fringes of the carpet on which the lions were killing the gazelles. Margo’s room had also remained unchanged after her death. A girl’s room. A narrow foldaway bed, a bookshelf and a porcelain cardinal bird on the night table.
My mother was washing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. The doorbell rang, a charity organisation bringing Mrs Rubinstein her supper: bread and cold cuts and cheese. Make her some peppermint tea, my mother called from the bathroom. And I did and set everything down in front of Mrs Rubinstein. I asked her if she’d like to eat by herself or whether I should keep her company, and she said in a tone of voice I remember to the present day, that it was all the same to her. So I sat down near her because it was all the same to her whether she ate by herself or in company, and I watched as she devoured the bread, cold cuts and cheese, apathetically and without appetite, without any feeling. She drank the peppermint tea and never took her eyes off the TV screen, and then she began to cry, and when I talked with my mother about it later, my mother said, She’s crying about Margo, she’s crying about her only child.
My mother pushed the vacuum cleaner through Margo’s room; she smoothed the bedspread on the folding bed and straightened the cardinal bird, and then she hung the washed dishtowels up outside on the balcony and watered the geraniums. She washed the cup from the peppermint tea and put the dishes for the charity out in the hall. While she was doing all this, she talked with Mrs Rubinstein; she talked about this and that, matter-of-factly but with solicitude in her voice, with warmth. She said, Don’t stay up too late, Mrs Rubinstein. And don’t cry so much. Go to bed early. Sleep eases everything. Until tomorrow then. I’ll come again tomorrow.
Towards the end Mrs Rubinstein couldn’t live alone any more. She was almost blind and could hardly hear anything; she fell and couldn’t get up by herself, and she couldn’t open the door for the charity people. A nephew three times removed turned up from somewhere and took things in hand and put Mrs Rubinstein into a home. He cleaned out the apartment in no time at all, and shortly before he turned over the key he permitted my mother to come by one last time to choose some small thing from among the stuff he had not yet sold. We accompanied our mother. We stood in the cellar around a cardboard box in which there were the ice skates with which, in the winter on the frozen lake, Margo Rubinstein as a young girl had turned graceful pirouettes, looking back over her shoulder in that inimitable way of hers. It was difficult to bear. I can’t remember whether we took anything, whether my mother took anything. I assume she was looking for the yellow notebook; she didn’t find it.
After the flat had been cleared out, during Mrs Rubinstein’s first weeks in the home, my mother and father went on a long trip. They were gone four weeks; then, when they came back, my mother had to go to work; she had to do this and that; perhaps two months passed before she found the time to visit Mrs Rubinstein in the home together with my father. It was unusual for my mother to take my father along on such a visit; perhaps she was a little afraid, didn’t think she could do it by herself. The home had a generous, bright common room, where seniors sat at round tables, whispering as they played solitaire; there was a friendly reception desk, an impressive aquarium and a conservatory full of bamboos and agaves. My mother and father went from the common room into the conservatory, to the reception desk and back; Mrs Rubinstein was nowhere to be seen. The room she had been assigned was empty. During their search for Mrs Rubinstein, my mother and father kept passing a figure sitting in a wheelchair near the foyer, a being in a wheelchair, and the fifth time they passed by, my father grabbed my mother’s arm and said softly, That’s her. That’s Mrs Rubinstein.
No, my mother said emphatically; that’s not her. Absolutely not.
The being in the wheelchair was a shrivelled, withered leaf. A living corpse, tiny and faded, almost defunct, with uncombed smoke-coloured hair projecting from her skull like bristly, tangled fur. But my mother took heart and spoke to her. She took one of the spectrally thin hands into her large, warm hand and spoke to her, and then she turned around to my father and said, Oh, you’re right; it really is Mrs Rubinstein.
Mrs Rubinstein died shortly after that; she was buried next to her daughter, and my mother returned home from the funeral almost cheerful. And then, many years later she informed us that she had received news of the death of the nephew three times removed; the daughter of the nephew had sent her a death announcement, saying that he had died after a short, serious illness. At first this information perplexed my sisters and me; then it made us angry. What did Mrs Rubinstein’s nephew three times removed and his daughter have to do with our mother; so we asked her, Can you tell us what these people have to do with you and why they sent you their death announcement? Why are they bothering you with that; why should you know about it.
But my mother ignored these questions. She quite clearly didn’t consider these questions worth answering. She changed the subject and started talking about something else; she seemed to know, I later thought, that questions like that would sooner or later answer themselves.
She knew.
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